Lilith Saintcrow

Three things I just wanted to note before my Friday Writing post:

* Pharyngula, on why faith is at odds with science and why this isn’t a bad thing. Why it is reasonable, and normal, and why science is better.

* Keely Kolmes, on whether therapists should Google their clients. Good stuff.

* And Cleolinda on Michael Jackson. I’ll just point at that, because she says everything I want to say.

And now, Friday writing! Onward!

Welcome to the second half of the trainwreck. Part One was yesterday. First I have some news, then we’ll get down to brass tacks.

On a COMPLETELY UNRELATED note to everything said yesterday or about to be said today, Romancenovel.tv is having a day of Samhain authors guest-blogging. My blog should be up at 3:30 EST; it’s three things you didn’t know about me. Really. Go on over and check it out–Dierdre Knight is guestblogging too, and Angela James has given some awesome interview.

Yesterday JT noted that I was bitter and working with a broad brush. In a world that treats me, at bottom, as property, of course I’m bloody bitter. Just look at Peter’sPaul’s screeds against women in the Bible. From what we can tell, Christ (if he existed at all) had no problem with women, and considered them equal members in divinity. PeterPaul didn’t feel this way, and his misogyny married to regular old misogyny in classical antiquity has poisoned our view of half of humanity ever since. And lest you try to drag out a red herring and say that other religions and cultures are misogynistic too, I agree wholeheartedly. My agreement, however, does not constitute an acceptance of this as something that should or always will be.

As for painting with a broad brush, well, I have only so much time and room here for a blog post. Last but not least, the idea that “Christ was sinless but we’re not, so you should forgive us carte blanche,” only goes so far. (Steven Barnes said over dinner, “The point of Christianity or Buddhism is not to create Buddhas or Christs. Society doesn’t want those people. They can’t be controlled.” Truer words, my friend…) Forgiveness does not equal bending over, and it does not equal stupidity in not checking identification.

Anyway, the second half of my train of thought centers on the persistent thread of body-hating in a lot of religions. The body, of course, being conflated with “matter”, “darkness”, “pollution”, and–you guessed it–”female”. The way to get out of the prison the body represents is by going upward into the sterile white (male) light of detachment/holiness.

This is such a basic assumption in Western culture that it creeps even into Western appropriations of other cultures. Even in Feuerstein’s book (which has started me thinking about these issues) he discusses[1] verticalist (we have to get up and out of our bodies), horizontalist (concerned with material things), and integral approaches. Tantra, he says, incorporates the integral approach; but pages later he is still talking about the prison of the body. The concept soaks our worldview so thoroughly it’s difficult to break away from.

We still see God as bright, white, rational, logical, and male. (And before you start saying that God has no gender, just consider this: God may have no gender, but when you say “God” in our society, the assumptions and baseline concepts that flash through our heads is MALE. God is referred to as “he” and seen as “he” even when political correctness tries to remedy that in rewrites of the King James.) The body is a prison holding our soul back from that bright white light of rational maleness. (Which is neither truly male nor exclusively rational, like any concept.) This leaves the body–and the woman–out in the cold.

They told us Eve ate the apple[2], so we have to pay for it. Over and over and over again. Raped, or worn out in childbirth, or denied proper safe contraception, or beaten by those who claim to love us, or denied the right to own property (since we are largely seen as property ourselves), the unspoken assumption is that we’re paying for that bite of the apple. It’s in the media our society’s built on–let’s just examine the misogyny in the Bible, or in Shakespeare (both relics of their time, yes, but both informing ours) or even in our modern movies or television shows.

Like the sitcom where the guy can be fat, but his wife/girlfriend can’t be above a size 2. (Her place must be made small so he can shine.) Or the principle of the Bad Girl in movies, which I’ve noticed and noted before. Any woman who controls her own sexuality in a movie must either have that sexuality co-opted by the (male) hero, die, or be horribly disfigured in some way. I’ve seen ONE movie in my life that flaunted that unspoken assumption, and it never made a lot of money.

Feuerstein goes on to note that most of Tantra is an integral approach. The body is part of All That Is, so it’s sacred too. It is just as much a playground for Shakti and Shiva as the “subtler” realms. (And the division of the “subtle” realms high up and the “coarse” realms down below in the mire of physicality…telling, isn’t it. To be fair, it’s not Feuerstein’s distinction; he’s just reporting it.) This is a revolution sadly lacking (or pulled out of) a lot of radical reimaginings of religion, or even bureaucratized out of originally radical religions. (Like Christianity itself.)

This tallied so much with my half-articulated notions that I had to stop several times in the ensuing explanation to sit and really, really think about what had just been said.

When I was less than half as young as I am now, I decided I didn’t want to go to Heaven. Hell appeared just a fiction to scare people into doing what the church wanted. I had come across the concept of the Summerland, where souls went to rest before a rebirth. Before the rebirth they would look over the lessons they’d learned, and choose what they wanted next time–subject, of course, to luck. Bad luck could mean that they didn’t get around to lessons they planned on, and so they would revise their curriculum. Human rights is a way of cutting down on that bad “luck”–as well as cutting down on the distressing tendency human beings have to just be bloody nasty to each other.

I’d go on and on here about violence, but that’s another blog post.

It’s not a perfect theory. I am aware of gaping holes in it. But it works for me, and the essential part is this: I don’t want a heaven and I don’t want a hell. I like it here just fine, and I like having a body. I intend to stick around for a few billion years and see what shakes out. If everyone else enters some detached, sexless nirvana/heaven, that’s fine. I’ve got all the nirvana I need here. Yes, this place is maddening, full of accident and hurt and people being nasty to each other. Life is suffering, as the Buddha noted.

But it doesn’t have to be, and I want to do my part and be a decent person so maybe, somehow, a little of that suffering can be ameliorated. Don’t think the carrot of heaven or the stick of hell will make me jump the fences of organized religion.

If this is truly my intent, the body becomes an ally and a glory instead of a trap and something to be flogged and controlled. It is an altar to the sacred instead of something I have to starve and beat to make it match the airbrushed ideal. It becomes MINE, instead of belonging to some big male.

I don’t say it’s perfect and I don’t say I’ll never revise what I think. The problem with religion, especially when it comes to human beings, is that people decide they know everything and they stop thinking. They stop admitting when the evidence doesn’t fit their theory. Common sense dies on the vine.

To slightly change the subject, I think a lot of violence is tied up with our attitudes toward the body and toward the female. When half of humanity is the Other, and subject to intimate violence (and the threat of violence) on a daily basis just by virtue of having no dangly naughties, and we all deep-down hate our bodies anyway, it makes it a lot easier to apply that “you are the Other and therefore disposable” sticker to everyone, not just women. This is by no means the sole reason for violence. I think, however, that it is the necessary prerequisite for a huge amount and type of violence we see worldwide. I’m fully aware that there’s a broad brush at work in this particular point too. I’m just…thoughtful.

Last but not least, there’s the legislation of what I can do with my body by various “moral” and religious “authorities”. Pharmacists can use their belief in an invisible sky fairy to deny me properly-prescribed contraception. Viagra is a sacrament but RU-486 is immoral. Abortion is killing babies, when the same people who campaign against it don’t care what happens to those babies once they’re outside the womb–and PROVE they don’t care by campaigning against social programs, universal healthcare for children, or even contraception itself. Because I was born with a uterus, I am automatically property and cannot dispose of said uterus in the fashion I deem fit. And let’s not even talk about the clitoris–a word so unsafe Google has to filter it. (“Penis”, however, is just dandy).

To those “authorities”, all I can say is this. (Warning, that link is so not safe for work. And it may offend you. Click at your own risk.)

This kind of endemic cultural conditioning is hard to work against. I suspect I’ll be kicking around these issues the rest of my life. However, the working out and the thinking-out-loud are both helping. I also, I am fully aware, live in a privileged position as a citizen of the richest country on earth, in a social class where I have the leisure to think about these things when the basic needs of survival are taken care of. That privileged position does make it incumbent upon me to examine my attitudes and do what I can.

So now comes the part where I ask you a question, dear Reader, considering that you’ve hung with me for this long through the ramble. What unconscious attitudes toward the body do you see? What do you think is the way out of the mess?

Let’s talk. And as usual, be nice in the comments. Disagreement is fine. Rudeness and trolling are not. Check the comment policy if you have any questions.

[1] I am not doing justice to Feuerstein’s definition and explanation by half or even a quarter.
[2] It wasn’t even an effing apple. It was a FIG.

I think I mentioned I’m reading Georg Feuerstein’s Tantra: Path of Ecstasy. I also polished off an Andrew Vachss–Hard Candy–and took a whack at Raymond Khoury’s The Last Templar. I can’t finish the Khoury–I got to the point where I was just skimming. I know it’s going to be a movie soon, and maybe that will help. Some books, especially books where the heroes are “physically striking” Mary Sues, Gary Stus, or authorial insertions, are actually HELPED by the compression into a visual form lasting an hour and a half.

Yes, I am fully aware I might be pilloried for that statement. Relax. What I have to say next will make that seem like popcorn.

Anyway, the weird intersection of these books has brought up a line of thought in the past few days.

Beware the man who says God talks to him and you have to do something for him before God will talk to you.

We have this thing in our culture where anyone who talks to God(s) without the proper clothing/hierarchical structure (i.e., a church) is headed for the psychiatric ward. A personal relationship with the Divine is frowned upon. I think this is largely because the mediation of spiritual/religious experience by church corporations is Big Business, and like all Big Business, they like to crush the competition.

And before you accuse me of hating churches, just don’t. I don’t mind churches. You want to go there, fine. I just don’t need some guy in a pulpit (and it’s always a guy, Unitarians notwithstanding) telling me what to do, and telling me to hand over my cash to thank him for his time and effort.

For me this is all rolled up with what Feuerstein calls the “verticalist” approach. In this approach, the body and the world are filthy, and the disciple must practice self-abnegation to a pathological degree to “free” himself (and yet again, it’s always a he) from this filthy, filthy world of desire and flesh. It’s gotten to the point where, when I see a man claiming to be a pure practitioner, I start checking my pockets and looking for the rot under the shiny surface. This has an unintended (or maybe perfectly intended) consequence. The verticalist approach is ripe ground for scam artists.

Another loosely-related aspect to this is political–PZ Myers often points out how a loud minority of “Christians” demand freedom for expression of their views in the public sphere and yet have flaming hissy fits over, say, atheists buying adspace on buses. Plus, there’s this whole thing about political figures having to attend church to prove they’re moral. WTF, people? Don’t you remember the big evangelical scams, some of them (*cough*RickWarren*cough*) still ongoing?

This was what made Christianity pretty much a no-go for me at a very early age. Jesus was poor, right? “Give up all you have and follow me.” He hung out with lepers and cripples and whores–people his good Jewish upbringing would tell him not to touch. So, a while later, the bureaucracy of his “followers”–who claim to espouse his virtues and beliefs–are more concerned with filling their pocketbooks than emptying them? (And peddling hatred of everyone who is “Not Us” as well.) The collection plate is passed every Sunday. Tithing is still rampant. Just to take two examples: the Catholic Church and the Mormon Church are both big, big corporations.

What happened to the virtue of poverty? Follow the money, honey.

Yes, churches do charitable work (most probably as tax breaks, and to keep those who actually believe the PR about Jesus out of trouble, diverting their energy away from reform). The former American administration thought churches would pick up the slack so the government could take money away from social programs and divert it toward making the rich, richer.

We can see how well that turned out. It made the rich richer, certainly. But the other stuff…not so much.

This idea that the physical world is a vale of sorrow and tears, that your real reward is in Heaven and while you’re on earth you should bow meekly to the funny-dressed people in pulpits telling you what their invisible sky fairy wants (and somehow, in some way, the collection plate always gets passed) is nothing more than a way to pull the wool over people’s eyes. And empty their pockets at the same time.

Now, there are religious movements that have done actual good. The Cathars were a revolt against the sybaritic leechdom of Rome, and they pretty much walked their walk to go with their talk. (The Church brought the temporal hammer down on them because the Cathars advocated NOT PAYING Rome, and that hit the Church where it lived.) The civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s depended heavily on a network of churches. (I don’t know if it still does, so I can’t speak to that.) Popular movements using the language and organization of churches to spread their messages are one thing. The scam part of religion is another.

How do I tell the difference? It’s easy. Follow the money. The people talking about Christ the most, do they live in high style? Do they tell their followers one thing and do another? I mean, just look at the whole Left Behind thing. As Slacktivist pointed out once, these people think Jesus is coming back in their lifetime. But are LaHaye and Jenkins investing for the future? You bet they are. They’re rich from the proceeds of their books and that money, believe me, is going into investments.

Why bother, if they truly believe Christ is coming back? The disassociation between what’s said and what’s actually being done is staggering.

I am not quite at the point of declaring all spirituality is hokum and bunk. My own spiritual life is a comfort to me, and it’s an ongoing set of miracles. However, I’m not looking to ram it down someone else’s throat (this is, after all, my blog that you don’t have to read) and it is so intensely personal I rarely talk about it with anyone. Nor do I expect anyone to pay me to explain it. (Before you ask, no, it doesn’t get into my books any more than any other author’s deeply-held beliefs get into theirs. Don’t drag that red herring out.)

No, not all spirituality is hokum and bunk. But a lot of people don’t pay the attention to choosing their church or their religion that they would pay even to choosing a brand of cereal or an automobile. Some will scream that their way is the Truth and the Right, and comparing it to buying something is HERESY ZOMG GET OUT THE STAKES AND THE GASOLINE! What I’m saying is slightly different. When you know someone is trying to sell you something, you should take a hard look at what you’re getting for your money/time/effort. Applying basic common sense to one’s religion is, I think, the best way to honor whatever God you’re praying to. Why would any god give us reason and free will only in order to hand us a series of legalistic, contradictory rules just ripe for scam artists to plunder the faithful with? Is that really what you think the Divine Matrix of All There Is would want?

You see, it just fails the most elementary WTF test. When I meet, say, a police officer asking me to open my door, I ask for proper identification. When someone writes a check down at the bookstore, I ask for proper identification. When I get an email telling me my account has been compromised and I should click here, I apply a basic WTF test (which is a form of asking for proper identification). When I make the decision to hire a babysitter, I apply several WTF tests and ask for proper identification.

When it comes to a god asking me to do shit for him, her, it, or them, you’d better believe I ask for proper goddamn identification and a WTF test to end all WTF tests. It’s an important decision, and I can’t see myself just doing it for something someone tells me is a god but I can’t see or apply any common sense to.

And if a god asks me to hand over cash, the same rules apply.

Part II of this long rambling train of thought will derail tomorrow–Religion And My Body. Stay tuned!

Note: Be nice in the comments, or you will be punted. Nuff said.